How to send 500 Internal Server Error error from a PHP script

header($_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL'] . ' 500 Internal Server Error', true, 500);

You may use the following function to send a status change:

function header_status($statusCode) {
    static $status_codes = null;

    if ($status_codes === null) {
        $status_codes = array (
            100 => 'Continue',
            101 => 'Switching Protocols',
            102 => 'Processing',
            200 => 'OK',
            201 => 'Created',
            202 => 'Accepted',
            203 => 'Non-Authoritative Information',
            204 => 'No Content',
            205 => 'Reset Content',
            206 => 'Partial Content',
            207 => 'Multi-Status',
            300 => 'Multiple Choices',
            301 => 'Moved Permanently',
            302 => 'Found',
            303 => 'See Other',
            304 => 'Not Modified',
            305 => 'Use Proxy',
            307 => 'Temporary Redirect',
            400 => 'Bad Request',
            401 => 'Unauthorized',
            402 => 'Payment Required',
            403 => 'Forbidden',
            404 => 'Not Found',
            405 => 'Method Not Allowed',
            406 => 'Not Acceptable',
            407 => 'Proxy Authentication Required',
            408 => 'Request Timeout',
            409 => 'Conflict',
            410 => 'Gone',
            411 => 'Length Required',
            412 => 'Precondition Failed',
            413 => 'Request Entity Too Large',
            414 => 'Request-URI Too Long',
            415 => 'Unsupported Media Type',
            416 => 'Requested Range Not Satisfiable',
            417 => 'Expectation Failed',
            422 => 'Unprocessable Entity',
            423 => 'Locked',
            424 => 'Failed Dependency',
            426 => 'Upgrade Required',
            500 => 'Internal Server Error',
            501 => 'Not Implemented',
            502 => 'Bad Gateway',
            503 => 'Service Unavailable',
            504 => 'Gateway Timeout',
            505 => 'HTTP Version Not Supported',
            506 => 'Variant Also Negotiates',
            507 => 'Insufficient Storage',
            509 => 'Bandwidth Limit Exceeded',
            510 => 'Not Extended'
        );
    }

    if ($status_codes[$statusCode] !== null) {
        $status_string = $statusCode . ' ' . $status_codes[$statusCode];
        header($_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL'] . ' ' . $status_string, true, $statusCode);
    }
}

You may use it as such:

<?php
header_status(500);

if (that_happened) {
    die("that happened")
}

if (something_else_happened) {
    die("something else happened")
}

update_database();

header_status(200);

PHP 5.4 has a function called http_response_code, so if you're using PHP 5.4 you can just do:

http_response_code(500);

I've written a polyfill for this function (Gist) if you're running a version of PHP under 5.4.

---

To answer your follow-up question, the HTTP 1.1 RFC says:

The reason phrases listed here are only recommendations -- they MAY be replaced by local equivalents without affecting the protocol.

That means you can use whatever text you want (excluding carriage returns or line feeds) after the code itself, and it'll work. Generally, though, there's usually a better response code to use. For example, instead of using a 500 for no record found, you could send a 404 (not found), and for something like "conditions failed" (I'm guessing a validation error), you could send something like a 422 (unprocessable entity).